Sometimes you meet someone who seems very intelligent at first, but after they keep talking, you realize you may have given them way too much credit. A Reddit post got people thinking about this by asking, “What’s a dead giveaway that someone is pretending to be smarter than they actually are?”
More than 4-thousand responses have come in so far calling out these red flags:⠀
- “They’re terrified of saying ‘I don’t know,’ so they keep talking until no one can interrupt.”
- “Instead of using better arguments, they get louder.”
- “Using complex words incorrectly just to sound like a thesaurus.”
- “They tell you how smart they are. I’ve met a lot of REALLY smart people in my life and none of them needed to inform me of how smart they are.”
- “They state their (tested online) IQ proudly before the conversation even begins.”
- “Overconfidence.”
- “Everything is addressed with a counterpoint, just for the sake of talking.”
- “Quoting Internet influencers.”
- “Refuse to explain what they mean because you wouldn’t ‘get it.'”
- “Always correcting people over tiny details but never adding anything useful to the convo.”
- “Disliking everything. They think they appear intelligent by pretending everything sucks and only what they like is smart and correct.”
- “An unwillingness to listen to a different point of view. I’ve always found that the really smart people know they don’t know everything; as long as you aren’t coming at them with something that they know is incorrect, they’re usually willing to hear you out (time permitting).”
- “Poor grammar. Dead giveaway. Poor manners also.”
- “Once they’ve learned something, that’s it. It’s set in concrete, can never be changed.”
- “They talk the most out of anyone in the room or meeting.”
- “Name dropping books or podcasts they clearly didn’t finish. Bonus points if it’s always the same one.”
Source: BuzzFeed
